3of3Picasso's “Danse Nocturne avec un Hibou (Night Dance with an Owl)” is a linocut that features a frolicking goat. Curator Lyle Williams compares the goat's buoyancy with a bull in a Matisse linocut that's also part of the exhibit.

SAN ANTONIO — After meeting in 1906 at Gertrude Stein's Paris salon — later dubbed “a moveable feast” by Ernest Hemingway — Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso developed one of the more complex — and, as it turned out, productive — relationships among the giants of 20th century art.

“Matisse referred to it as a boxing match,” said Lyle Williams, curator of prints and drawings at the McNay Art Museum. “They saw each other's work in galleries and actually visited each other's studios throughout their careers. I think they did actually like each other. It would be hard to maintain a relationship over so many years without having some feeling for the other. Certainly, they respected each other's work.”

“Matisse and Picasso: A Friendly Rivalry,” through Aug. 10 at the McNay, traces the evolution of what Williams calls “a visual dialogue between artists.”

“It started in 1906 and extended beyond Matisse's death in 1954,” Williams said. “Picasso once credited Matisse with spurring his interest in African art by showing him a sculpture he had bought for his collection. African art would be critical to Picasso's development of Cubism.”

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“Friendly Rivalry” also is remarkable because it is drawn from across the McNay's collections — including prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture and costume design. Not many museums can do that.

“We had wanted to do an exhibition like this for some time,” Williams said, “and when we began looking at the work, we began seeing all these parallels.”

The exhibition opens with two paintings: Matisse's “The Red Blouse,” from Marion Koogler McNay's behest, and Picasso's “Femme Couchée (Reclining Woman).” Both are from the '30s and about the same size. Albeit through very different lenses, they depict women important in the artists' lives: A demure Lydia Delectorskaya, Matisse's assistant, sits in a red blouse with her hands crossed in her lap (look for the artist's self-portrait in a mirror in the background), while Picasso has painted his young mistress Marie Therese Walter as a voluptuous nude. The figures are outlined in thick, black lines; red is a key element in each work.

“They represent scenes from the artists' lives,” Williams said. “In another version of the Picasso painting, the artist included a shadow of himself over the subject.”

Two prints from the '50s — a Matisse aquatint called “Marie José en robe jaune” and a Picasso lithograph titled “Mother and Children” — are linked formally, Williams noted.

“Both artists opened up the scale of their prints in the 1950s, possibly in response to the works of the abstract expressionists,” he said. “Despite being in two different print media, the images are comprised of similarly short, wide and bold lines. Both artists use these lines to describe the eyes and noses of the faces in each print in a quick, cursory and almost abstract way.”

Growing up in Houston, Steve Bennett started reading the newspaper before he even entered kindergarten. Ok, it was the comics, but still. It instilled in him a love of reading and art that carried him through Temple High School in Central Texas and the University of Texas at Austin. After graduating with a degree in journalism in 1982, Steve went to work for the San Antonio Light, covering the arts. When the Light closed, he found work in Olympia, Wash. as a features editor and endured the soggy weather for two years before getting homesick and returning to Texas. Steve's been with the Express-News for 15 years, first as an editor in the features section, the last 10 or so covering books, the visual arts and most recently architecture and design.